MacBook Pro & Other Apple Notebooks to Get Touchscreen Display [New Apple Patent Shows Laptops With Touchscreen Panels; Do We Really Need That?]

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The tablet industry is growing at a very fast-paced rate and all the hot smartphones around have touchscreen displays, but do we really need a touch-based interface added to laptops too? It looks like that’s how the future looks like, and whether we like it or not, a touchscreen display is heading to a notebook near you too. And Apple might just be one of the first companies to (re)invent the touchscreen display for a laptop.

We already have desktops with touchscreen panels, and I’m not a big fan of those either. I happen to use a laptop on a regular basis, and for a few years now it replaced my desktop as my main computer. While a touchscreen interface would come in handy, I don’t think I’d use it that much, and can’t think of a way to actually make it a pleasant experience. In fact I think I’d get tired to point my finger to the screen when I already have a handy touchpad to listen to my every move.

But Apple has a patent that shows how a MacBook laptop could integrate a touchscreen IPS display in the near future. I can see a smaller MacBook Air that would have such a feature. Think of it as a tablet with Mac OS X running the whole show instead of iOS while a full keyboard is always attached to it. But that keyboard would ruin the whole iPad/tablet experience wouldn’t it?

Getting back to the patent at hand though, we’ll remind you that this isn’t the first patent we see from Apple here and like always with these things we might never see it materialize soon. Although, if the iPad keeps cannibalizing its own, then Apple might want to convince consumers to get a touchscreen Mac instead of an iPad (that would be a strange pitch to hear from Apple) to get more out of both worlds.

What’s your stance on touchscreen displays for desktops or notebooks?